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Brown vs. Board of Education; 1954
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| DaveSaenz |
| quote: | Dec. 9, 2003 -- Before the landmark 1954 ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, black parents were faced with the prospect of sending their children to inferior schools. But some Southern families found a way to avoid the segregated system, delivering their children to relatives in other states that offered integrated classrooms.
NPR's Debbie Elliott reports on the story of Walt Swanston and Bettye Snowden, two sisters from Clinton, La., who were put on trains for Oakland, Calif., where they lived with an aunt and uncle so they could attend integrated schools.
Swanston, now director of diversity management at NPR, is bitter about a system that caused her to lose time with her family. "Even though I enjoy a lot of the riches and enjoy a lot of the opportunities that I might not have had [in Clinton], I question the value of breaking up a family. Even though it was for a good cause, I still see that my family was broken apart -- was torn apart." |
This week is the anniversary of the closing arguments for Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas, 1954; a decision that mandated racial desegregation "with all deliberate speed" of public schools in the South and Midwest United States. Of course in many areas, "with all deliberate speed" often meant, "decades." There are links to the NPR streams about the decision and the people it affected:
http://www.npr.org/display_pages/fe...re_1538578.html
/proud progressive libertarian:D |
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| imokruok |
The education cases in the 1950's and 1960's (Brown, Charlotte, etc.) are responsible for the destruction of urban areas and vibrant inner cities. It's one thing to say separate is not equal - that's fine, because that was the truth. But the court-mandated responses (i.e., busing) screwed up more than they fixed.
When white parents had to send their children 10 miles across town to go to a school where they didn't know anyone (and when there was a school right in their backyard), it just gave them the impetus to leave the city altogether. Hence the term "white flight," which began in the early 1960's. Education was one of the major, if not the primary reasons for it. And the result is a segregation of society - not a desegregation of schools. |
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| Konijn Island |
| quote: | Originally posted by imokruok
The education cases in the 1950's and 1960's (Brown, Charlotte, etc.) are responsible for the destruction of urban areas and vibrant inner cities. |
this is patently untrue
| quote: | | Hence the term "white flight," which began in the early 1960's. Education was one of the major, if not the primary reasons for it. And the result is a segregation of society - not a desegregation of schools. |
"white flight" was linked to a matrix of factors, the most prominent being housing; it also began in the 1940s.
for the post-war urban deterioration of the industrial northeast please read:
Thomas Sugrue's "Origins of the Urban Crisis"
Kenneth Jackson's "Crabgrass Frontier"
Michael Katz's "The 'Underclass' Debate"
Robert Caro's "The Power Broker"
for the west coast:
Mike Davis "City of Quartz"
Becky Nicolaides "My Blue Heaven" |
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| Konijn Island |
the situation immediately following WWII was hardly a trickle. It was, in fact, a flood which culminated in the urban rioting that swept places like Watts, Cleveland, Detroit, Harlem, and Brooklyn in the '60s (unless, of course, you believe that these uprisings just occurred acontextually).
Levittown was one of many similar developments that were springing up all accross the country. Below is an incredibly simplified model of what was happening in the post-war period.
New Deal agencies like the HOLC, colluding with local banking and real estate interests, created appraisal maps that determined the value of a particular neighborhood based on primarily racial characteristics--thus, even if a particular block had a single black family living on it, all the adjoining properties were devalued. Overnight, vibrant working-class neighborhoods found themselves devalued and labeled slum areas.
At the same time that this was happening, other agencies like the FHA provided long-term, low interest rate mortgages for white families to move into the suburbs. This combination of push factors (the racially-based devaluation) and pull-factors (the chance to own rather than rent a spacious home in suburbia) created a situation where it was essentially irrational for white homeowners to stay in the urban core.
Add to this: federal subsidies of highway construction; the shift from industrial to service-oriented economies (or from fordist- to post-fordist); the awarding of defense contracts to semiconductor and high technology industries in the sunbelt; and the move of the remaining industrial sector companies to the South were land was cheaper and labor laws weaker, and you have a steady process of urban deterioration that occured primarily through the '50s.
Remember that as this was going on outside the city, the urban core faced neglect and a withering tax-base adding to its problems. Desegregation of schools and violent police crackdowns of the civil rights movement set off violence in the 1960s that had been brewing for over twenty years. Neither the timeline nor the article you provided refute this.
I would just ask you to 'trust me' on this as I study, write about, and teach this stuff for a living. |
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| imokruok |
I believe we agree on the reasons. I don't doubt that there were quite a few other societal shifts going on in the 1950's-1970's. We just disagree on degree of effect.
I take a look at the area in which I grew up - Milwaukee, one of the most segregated cities in the US - and if you draw a map of the school districts, you've also drawn yourself a map of racial boundaries. There are streets where one side is, literally, black and the other white.
I also take a distinct legal outlook on these topics since that's my field. And so my view is closer to what those in law review articles write, rather than your books. Just like when I was a political science student, I relied on presidential analysts for my research rather than court cases. ("academic incest")
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This was from an article on the Charlotte case that I got off of Westlaw.
A. White Flight
By the 1970s, a crucial problem had emerged: white flight to suburban areas. White flight came about, in part, to avoid school desegregation and, in part, as a result of a larger demographic phenomenon, namely endangered successful desegregation. White families moved to suburban areas to avoid being part of desegregation orders affecting cities. In virtually every urban area, the inner city was increasingly comprised of racial minorities. By contrast, the surrounding suburbs were almost exclusively white and what little minority population did reside in suburbs was concentrated in towns that were almost exclusively African-American. School district lines parallel town borders, meaning that racial separation of cities and suburbs results in segregated school systems. For example, by 1980, whites constituted less than one-third of the students enrolled in the public schools in Baltimore, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Memphis, New York, and Philadelphia. Thus, by the 1970s, effective school desegregation required interdistrict remedies. |
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